What Is Design Theory and Methodology Show Notes

Course Concepts #1: What is Design Theory and Methodology?

Show Notes

In this podcast, discussing the subject scope of the Design Theory and Methodology course, Mieke talks to Peter about his role as Editor-in-Chief of the one of the leading academic journals in design research, which is called Design Studies. Many of the papers published in Design Studies feature in the course readings and the scope of the journal corresponds quite well with the scope of the course.

They go on to discuss in more detail what the course is about, giving students concepts to think with to determine how a particular theory or method fits with them. They discuss whether there really should be a distinction between theory and practice, before outlining what the course is NOT about – an introduction to currently available methods of design. For that students are advised to read the Delft Design Guide (which we talk about in more detail in Podcast #4: A Short History of Design Methods).

This podcast forms the first in a short series about the DTM course concepts. This podcast discusses the scope of the course and is followed by three podcasts discussing each of the three learning objectives for the course. Together, these ‘Course Concepts’ podcasts sit alongside the eight ‘content’ podcasts looking at different aspects of design theory and methodology.

Podcast Transcript

Mieke van der Bijl: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Design Theory and Methodology podcast series. My name is Mieke and today we're going to talk about basically the main topic of this whole series, and that is: what is Design Theory and Methodology. To talk about this topic, we thought it would be interesting to interview the Editor-in-Chief of Design Studies, Design Studies being one of the most important journals in the field of design research. And the Editor-in-Chief is Professor Peter Lloyd. So welcome, Peter.

Peter Lloyd: Thanks Mieke, nice to be here with you.

Mieke: So nice to have you on this podcast series. I noticed you are a little bit injured. Can you tell us what happened?

Peter: Yes, I cut my finger in a blender.

Mieke: Oh no.

Peter: There was a lot of blood, but fortunately there's not so much pain anymore!

Mieke: Ok, so you're happy to talk.

Peter: Oh yeah, I'm okay to talk.

Mieke: So maybe firstly, can you tell us something about your work with Design Studies. What does it mean to be an Editor-in-Chief?

Peter: Well, basically it means handling a lot of paper submissions, academic paper submissions. In terms of a process, people all over the world in universities that are interested in design studies or studies of designing carry out research, produce theory, thinking about designing, and they submit their work in the form of a paper to a journal. I'm the person responsible for managing what actually ends up in the journal. It's a bit like a magazine. If you submit an article to a magazine. But we go through this process where papers are peer-reviewed. They're sent out to experts in the field who then comment on the paper. And depending on those comments, papers are either rejected or they're accepted into the journal. We have six issues a

year, and we tend to publish about 40 papers a year. We get a lot of submissions. We get about 600 submissions. So not many papers actually get published into the journal. They have to be at an appropriate standard to get published. Quite a few papers in the readings for this course actually come from Design Studies and I think as a journal it represents the scope of design theory and methodology quite well.

Mieke: I think a first question to ask when you are enrolled in this course is: what is design theory and what is design methodology?

Peter: Yeah, good question! In a way they are questions that you have to make up your own mind about. I don't think there's any foolproof definition of those subject areas. It's an area of inquiry where, some people say: “this is a theory”, and some other people would say: “well, that's not a theory”. The idea is that there's a debate around conceptual issues in the subject area. But I tend to think of design theory and methodology is essentially looking at the concepts relating to the activity of design. It might be about what a method is. It might be about something like: what is framing? What is creativity? It might be about how we can design better or it might be about what it is that the activity of design actually is. I mean, that's a fundamental question. Is it an ability that everyone has to some extent, or is it a very specialised ability with specialised forms of thinking and practising and collaborating? That's the kind of question that we can ask in a course like design theory methodology. It's a way of talking in conceptual terms about what we do when we design. It's not about necessarily saying this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do. It's about opening up the field of discussion about the activity of designing and the possibilities of designing.

Mieke: Ok so you say that design theory and methodology is basically about talking about designing and having a conversation about designing. It's not so much about doing design, but more stepping back and looking at it and talking about it.

Peter: And being able to kind of reflect on it, but also reflect critically on the concepts related to design theory and methodology. I think there are three separate aspects to think about. One is that we're very interested in what it is that designers actually do. Behind that question is: what is a designer? One area is: what is design activity? How do we know when we see design activity? What are the characteristics of design activity? What's good designing? What's bad designing? All those sorts of things. So that's about the kind of behavior of designers in various contexts. The second thing is what should designers be doing? The models and the tools and the

methods are all ways of sort of saying designers should be doing X, Y or Z in some way or other. It's taking what we know about designing and turning it into something that's useful in terms of methods and tools. And the third thing is really the concepts related to these to these two other aspects - the descriptions of designing and the prescriptions for designing. So that's talking about concepts like framing, creativity, bias in design processes, collaboration, codesign, all those sorts of terms that are vague and ambiguous to most people. It's trying to clarify what we're talking about when we're talking about these things.

Mieke: So you're saying there are three things. You're talking about how designers are actually designing their behavior. And then you talked about, well, how should they be designing? What kind of methods and tools can we offer that help designers possibly get better? And this third aspect of concepts is quite ambiguous to me. Can you maybe give an example of that?

Peter: Well, if you take a concept like 'framing', we talk about framing in the first podcast. A lot of people talk about 'framing a problem' or 'framing a...', Framing something within a design process. But what is the activity of framing? What is it? How do we describe it? What is it conceptually that we do when we're framing things? What kind of a concept is it? Is it something related to problems? Is it something related to creativity? Or is it something related to, I don't know, some other aspect of designing? It's taking an idea like that and just interrogating it. I think that's the third level. And that could be anything that applies to designing. Design thinking might be another thing where you sort of think, well, what's design thinking? How can we define it? How can we understand it? How can we use it? That's a sort of conceptual inquiry into what design thinking is. One of the distinctive things about the subject area is what is design method and what design method do? Which is quite distinct from other subjects where there's not so much emphasis on the methods of doing an activity.

If you think about an activity like medicine, you know, that also has a practice associated with it and methods for dealing with patients, but also dealing with surgical operations or those kinds of things. But there isn't the same focus on methodology in medicine that there is in design. And that's what to some extent makes our subject quite unique in that we have this huge range of methods that we can talk about and weigh up against each other. We can work out what's a good methodology, what's a good way of getting some kind of outcome, because methods are always related to achieving outcomes. That relationship between the outcome

and the method is also something we can think about within the context of a course like design theory and methodology. Does following a particular method entail a certain outcome? I think most people would sort of say "not really", because there's always the designer at the center of the process. And if they don't follow the method correctly or they kind of deviate from the method, then you can sort of say, well, the outcome is not what it should have been. A method doesn't entail a certain kind of outcome, but what does it do in that case? That's the sort of question that we can explore in this course.

Mieke: So then if you're saying, well, you know, some people argue that there's maybe not a clear relation between a method and a design outcome, then why do we need design theory and why do we need design methodology?

Peter: I think it's useful to be able to think about these things, you know, to actually have conversations about these things, partly in order to improve what we do as designers. We can go about these things very intuitively. If you study art and design, for example, there's not much discussion about the theory of what you do as an artistic designer. You tend to sort of have your own habits and your own kind of methods, but you don't really communicate them. We're talking about a more rational design process, that opens up the process and makes it a bit more objective to other people. By having a method, we're able to communicate what we do better, both to our colleagues and peers, but also to the clients that we deal with, too. We can sort of rationalize the design process into separate stages and say, you know, this is what we're going to do at this stage, this is what we can do at this stage. And that makes it useful in terms of communicating, but it also makes it useful in terms of structuring the process. If you're embarking on a new design where do you start? What do you begin with? And a method will just help give you some sort of starting points and guide you through the process. The theories associated with methods are things that inform the methods in a way that is always aimed at being useful for designers in helping them to design better.

Mieke: So how is design theory and methodology developed? Is that really something that should just be left to people who work in academic institutions or universities, or are there other ways that it is being developed?

Peter: I don't really draw a distinction between academics and practitioners. We're all practicing to some degree and that what we look for in [the Design Studies] journal is people that are being thoughtful about what they do. It doesn't matter who

is doing that. Doesn't matter whether you're a professor or a designer in a company. If you've got a certain thoughtfulness about what you do and you were able to report that in an insightful way, then I think that's the key to doing good research in design theory methodology.

Mieke: I'm just thinking about what Donald Schon [Podcast #1] has written about the relationship between theory and practice. He basically says that they're not so separate from each other, in fact he says that every designer, when they are practicing design, they're also developing theory. So how is that different from someone who would be publishing in your journal, who would be kind of building this body of knowledge?

Peter: What practice is a really interesting question. To some degree we all have our working theories, our kind of personal theories about what we're doing. And that's something that helps us reflect. It helps us to learn. It helps us to hypothesize what might happen in a process, you know, some of the ideas that we have about designing are just our kind of personal theories. In a journal like Design Studies, it's a little bit more objective. You have to have better evidence for a position that you take. It has to be defensible. It has to be justifiable. So often we have controlled studies that isolate an aspect of behavior. But the relationship between theory of practice is very close particularly in an area like designing. Even in the faculty you can see how close the practitioners of design are to the researchers in design. And sometimes there is an approach that's called 'research through design'. So that brings the two approaches very close; the actual practice of designing is also a practice of research. They're very entwined, these two things. To make a distinction between on the one hand, academic research over here and on the other hand, we have practice. And these two things don't really meet. I think that's wrong.

Mieke: Yeah, we also have colleagues who say, well, you know, we as academics, we need to develop methodology and then the practitioners, then they can go and use them. And for me, it often doesn't work like that. I think both in practice and in universities, we are developing theories and methodologies that we can all learn from.

Peter: It's all mixed together, too. In a faculty like Industrial Design engineering there are people that are putting theory into the mix and people putting practice into the mix. Theory isn't necessarily a good thing. People produce bad theory in a similar way that people practice in bad ways you know. But if you get good theory and good

practice together - really what we're trying to aim for identifying, in a course like design theory and methodology, is what is it that makes theory good and what is it that makes practice good? And, you know, if we can combine those two things together, then all the better.

Mieke: Ok, thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to share with listeners about this topic?

Peter: There's one further thing I'd like to say and that's about what design theory and methodology isn't. A lot of people expect that it's simply going to be about listing different methodologies and saying if you want to do this, then use this methodology. And that's really not what the course is about. We're not recommending any particular methodology, it's not really telling you what methodology you should use. It's really giving you the conceptual instruments to look critically at different methodologies and think, what are they trying to achieve and how will they best fit my behavior? We're trying to teach people to be critical about design methodology, but we're also trying to advocate [for design methodology]. We're saying that design methodology is a useful thing to use, but at the end of the course, you're not going to know which design methodologies that we think you should use because we're not going to recommend any to you. You will have a richer understanding of what design methodology is and tries to achieve though.

Mieke: Yeah, maybe also get a better understanding of what types of theory and methodology are useful to you as a designer? Because I think each designer is different also, when it comes to using these types of theories and methodologies.

Ok, well, thanks very much, Peter.

Peter: Thanks, Mieke.

Mieke: That was very insightful. This was the first episode in a series of podcasts about design theory and methodology. This first podcast was to introduce the subject area of DTM. From now on, we will be publishing a number of different types of podcasts. We have podcasts that are related to the content of the design theory and methodology. And then we'll also produce three podcasts that are more about the specific learning outcomes of design theory and methodology course. So thank you very much and I'm looking forward to see you again in the next podcast.